What is your self-talk like these days? Who do you think you really are? And what do you think you can accomplish in your life? Is your vision of yourself small, or is it bold and powerful?
If you ever suffer from low self-confidence and self-doubt, you have to look no further to lift your spirits than to the fact you are HUMAN. You might be proud of your family or even your country, but are you ever proud of being a human being? Do you realize what our ancestors have had to overcome for us to be not only just hanging out around here, but thriving?
There are about 6 billion of us on this planet. This fact doesn’t make us feel particularly special. Drowned in these numbers, we see ourselves as average, ordinary. Yet this massive number is the best possible evidence of our individual potential. Zoom out just a little bit and you will soon realise just how incredible each one of us really is. Just think: it has taken 3.6 billion years to evolve from simple cells into the immensely complex, brilliant creatures we are. To get to the body you moan about and compare critically to the next one, it took 3,600,000,000 years. Through all this unimaginable time, our ancestors stewed in various elements, crawled through mud, battled extreme heat and cold, made home in the most inhospitable places on Earth, fought off thousands of predators and diseases, and just generally had a pretty rough time. But they survived and carried on, through incredible tenacity and resilience, and here are WE, at the end of this chain through time.
When you consider what homo sapiens had to go through to become homo sapiens, it puts things into a bit of a perspective. Is it really that difficult to make that phone call? To get your crap together enough to do a bit of exercise every day? To get your office organised? To get up in front of some people and tell them a story? Even to ditch the job you hate and go forge your own path?
The challenges of today for us domesticated humans are rather puny compared to what we had to deal with in the past to make it, as individuals and as species. Underneath the placid veneer, we are tough, inventive and infinitely capable of responding to what’s being thrown at us. All we need is motivation – a threat, or, a better one, an encouragement.
In spite of what we believe, our brains are remarkably similar. The blueprint for survival and success is the same in all of us. So, if you are ever feeling small, remember this: inside your head is a machine very much like those that managed to build empires, fly to the moon, develop antibiotics, create thousands of languages, and figure out what happened in the first split second of the Big Bang. We are tiny to the point of ridicule, yet we can peer across galaxies and comfortably calculate the power of black holes. And as far as we know, there is nobody else who can do that, not for millions of light-years, anyway. I will close with this: there are approximately 10 to the power of 60 atoms in the universe. Your little brain, however, has 10 to the power of 1,000,000 different ways it can wire itself up. Now, if this doesn’t raise your self-confidence, I’m not quite sure what will.
Stay brave,
